I sure _hope_ this is where the matter rests, for this year anyway.

However there is still a joker in the deck--the so-called "Quality Assurance Initiative." The Republicans have been checked in their desire to slash in-home care first of all on the general priniciple that people should do good for free (never mind the questions of how people who wish to provide hundreds of hours worht of care for their loved ones are supposed to survive if they do that--not a problem if you are rich and just hire someone to do the care I guess--nor the profound question of how a disabled person who needs such levels of support is supposed to have anything approaching human rights if they have to beg for people to do stuff for them "out of the goodness of their hearts." I tell you, as an IHSS worker for 15 years I have done a _lot_ of uncompensated, unmandated assistance that sometimes puts me at risk, over and above the uncovered risks the nominal duties put me at. But the R's always came to us first for cuts and too often the Dems let them do it.

How could they do cuts when we were already at minimum wage? That is where "Quality Assurance" comes in! They can always just pretend they don't see the need for this or that service (Arnold had a lot of those cuts in there) and make them disappear. Or they can hold that social workers have been sloppy and overgenerous assigning hours--hence the desire to "tighten" controls.

We heard a lot about "waste, fraud, and abuse in the past 5 years" when Arnold breezed into office. I can tell you about some fraudulent abuse I witnessed, in LA County in 1991. The counties wee under ordres to save money and my boss's new social worker showed up about 2 hours late for the annual review appointment, and told a long story about her private family life. Well, my boss had a nice casual friendly relationship with her retired former social worker so none of this seemed out of line to us, but then the woman took a look at her watch, and announced she would have to run but first she was going to find my boss needed 10 percent less hours--"no, no, be quiet, I'm running late and my supervisor will support me in this because the county needs to save money, goodbye!" and she was off to victimize another person dependent on these services.

That is I think an example of how "Quality Assurance" is going to work. What happened in LA was fraudulent of course because the woman made no effort to assess, though I believe she was planning to perjure herself in a "fair hearing" as they call appeals and lie like a rug-it was her job that year. If done with a little effort at the appearance of imartial assessment obviously it is possible to suddenly discover that a lot of hours formerly assessed were superfluous and just rely on most recipients being too intimidated to stand up for themselves.

I think a lot of the "out of control" growth in IHSS hours under Davis was a matter of exposure of similar subterfuges of underassement in many counties that always strived to minimize their caseload in this way. In 1984 my boss lived in a county that refused to assess _anyone_ as needing more than 20 hours a month! By this medical miracle the county by an odd coincidence was saved from having to fully implement the program, which provided some options mandatorially for any recipient needing over 20 hours, and reserved its meager IHSS budget exclusively for a contractor who, unchecked, perpetuated their own abuses. But I imagine had a cozy relationship with the County Sueprvisors. Now that is what I call fraud and abuse, and I suspect that under Davis a number of these counties cleaned up their act a bit lest they get caught at flagrant neglect of their charge, and this accounts for a lot of hour and case expansion--in other words these were people fraudulently kept off the budget under Republican guidance.

So "Quality Assurance" is an effort to put the genie back in the bottle, and at least it will make a pretense of being fair and based on objective criteria. But I doubt this battle will ever be over, since any gains we make in good years will only be cited as grounds to roll us back at the first opportunity. Never mind that I am still making less money than I would bussing tables in Reno!

In the budged crisis of the 1990s another neat trick they did at the same time as slashing IHSS back by means of fraud (in '92 the Legislature mandated an openly acknowledged rollback-which would be on top of the fraudulent ones of course, and the latter would never be restored as the legislative rollback was some years later) was to freeze state COLAs on SSI and to reduce the state outlay by the amount of the Federal COLA--they did this several years running even while raising the compensation for being a legislator. In this way the net incomes of people on SSI, including most disabled people, were frozen but of course cost of living did increase, but the state budget ate the Federal cOLA. Which by the way was itself unrealistically small. Unlke IHSS hour reductions these cuts were never restored and so my boss's income today is 20 percent lower in real terms than when I met her, half that being due to the state intercepting 3 years of COLAs the rest being from inadequate COLAs to begin with!

Arnold wanted to do that again this year but at last report the legislature stands firm against it.

On the whole the Legislature has shown more spine and resolve than I have seen in a long time, and Schwarzenneger's good reputation is based almost solely on caving in to the mass mobilization of citizens which have given the Lege their muscle. I hope we can safely let the press go on braying about Arnold's magic and how all problems were due to Gray Davis--if the people don't forget where their real power is.

Schwarzenneger's good reputation is based almost solely on caving in to the mass mobilization of citizens which have given the Lege their muscle.

Ya' got that straight. With the convergence of Donna Arduin and the Wilson government-in-waiting, it's amazing we haven’t had more damage. Good thing we have a guy who is less capable than Davis at "one shot at a time" politics.

I just heard an anecdote about our county that a few years back, a survey determined that 75% of people were unable to make it through the paperwork requesting county services - no wonder IHSS has grown. Imagine what horrors would occur if children got healthcare, or if the mentally ill could get medical care. Seriously, the union is doing God's work advocating for otherwise vulnerable patients.

This year's battle looks to have been made somewhat harmless, but this shell game can not go on forever. We still have a huge structural deficit, and until the freeways in OC fall apart, we aren't going to close it with taxes.